The collapse of the Archons’ raised permissions was not a gentle fading of light. It was a violent, cascading system failure that ripped through the Board with the brutality of a heavy-duty explosion.
Across the eight-sided dais, the twelve crystal-clear thrones shuddered as their underground power feeds were suddenly cut by the Central Ledger Pillar’s self-running circuit breakers.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
A rapid row of explosive concussions echoed from beneath the marble floor as the high-voltage step-down transformers overloaded and blew their copper coils. Plumes of acrid, gray smoke and the foul stench of scorched stone oil billowed from the spreading joints between the flat stone slabs, swirling into the thinning air of the sealed dome. The floor plates buckled upward by several inches in the corners, jarred loose by the magnetic-pull concussions.
Above each throne, the amazing golden auras—the sacred halos of divine immortality that had shone uninterrupted across four dynasties—shuddered wildly.
The radiant light didn’t simply put out. It fractured into jagged, flickering bands of sickly yellow, orange, and dull leaden gray, pulsing with the uneven, dying rhythm of an untuned empty pocket tube. Then, with a series of sharp, sound pops that sounded like breaking bones, the halos shattered fully.
